


Welcome to the Neighborhood

by Rueitae



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Gen, Lion Goddess Allura, Yeah you read the character tags right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 09:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17078165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rueitae/pseuds/Rueitae
Summary: Allura is not dead and the story isn’t over.Fight me.





	Welcome to the Neighborhood

**Author's Note:**

> My post s8 catharsis fic. Canon compliant as far as I can tell, which is the goal. Let’s continue this adventure.

She sees them all, every possibility in every reality, every moment that makes one branch from the other. Billions of new realities are born every tick as decisions are made in everyday life.

A yalmore turns right instead of left. Her nana chooses a different dress for her to wear on her tenth birthday. A man picks up a piece of trash instead of leaving it on the beach. Each one creates their own strand of reality.

It doesn’t hurt, all this information, at least not her head.

She aches as Earth is destroyed before Voltron is reformed, the Paladins only children. Her heart is sick watching as Lotor grows up in cold loneliness time and time again.

She reaches out to change it, to prevent her loved ones from pain. She finds herself unable to touch or affect anything.

So she observes; all at once she experiences joy for her friends and mourns for what could have been and what has been lost. She sees millions of realities where she has a family of her own, sometimes with Lance but not always. The number of children vary and if her oldest is a girl or a boy. In others she remains single but alive.

Only in the one she left behind does she become what she is.

Which is… what, exactly?

Allura isn’t sure, but it becomes harder to see the different realities through watery eyes. She sees her happy ending unfairly play over and over in different ways. It does nothing to soothe the longing in her heart.

Over time she learns each reality like the back of her hand and begins to foresee the divergent realities. Soon, she cannot tell what is the past and what is the future.

What’s the point of having all this power - of having to leave her loved ones - if she cannot do good?

Physical contact, the first since she sacrificed herself, surprises her and interrupts her concentration.

“Careful, sweetheart. Too much work this quickly will make you go mad.”

Allura turns around in the white void to greet her guest.

Of all the people she expects to visit her in the afterlife, Bob is not one of them.

Allura believes herself a reasonable person, and the last time she saw Bob he’d held her and the other Paladins captive on his game show.

She summons her bayard with a growl and wraps her whip around the surprised host, jerking him and his floating platform towards her.

“What do you want?” she seethes in his face. “Is this _your_ doing?”

“Hey! I’m not the one who decided to go out in a blaze of glory!” he protests, raising his bound hands as high as he can. “That was all you.”

“‘Great judge of heroes’, my quiznak!” Fury fills her heart remembering Coran’s explanation - oh Coran she misses him so much already - of the supposed judge of those who would do great things. “Did you know all of this would happen? Did you know Honerva would try to destroy everything?”

Allura hasn’t seen Honerva since parting with the Paladins. To think all of this, her fate included, culminated from a desire for family.

But blood does not a family make. Allura takes that to heart above all else. Her Paladins are alive and thriving, so she can endure whatever this is for their sakes.

“Hey, I keep tabs on potential heroes! That’s my job! It’s _your_ job to watch different realities, Ms. Lion Goddess.”

Allura lets his words sink in, a pit falling in her stomach. “What… did you call me?”

“Lion Goddess,” Bob says dryly. “Welcome to the neighborhood, by the way. Norlax and I got you a fruit basket. Which I’d love to give to you, if you’d be so kind as to let me go.”

“Can’t you just...poof out, or something?”

“In my realm? Sure. Not in your place though.”

Allura lets the blue bayard revert to its base form. The flash of anger is nearly gone, replaced with a weight in her heart she isn’t sure she wants.

Lion Goddess is what the Arusians first called her, a title she rejected. Even now she does not wish for it.

She now knows this isn’t death.

Bob hovers closer, wrapping a friendly arm around her shoulders and dropping a basket of Altean fruit in her unprepared hands.

“Thank you… Bob. It’s lovely.” Though the words fit the situation, they taste strange as they leave her mouth. The mundane exchange feels like it should take place anywhere other than in this void.

“You’ll get used to it,” Bob assures her as if reading her stunned thoughts. “Take some time to spruce up the place. You’re only limited by your imagination, your realm, your powers, your fashion. And you, kid, have plenty of it, what with bringing back Altea and managing infinite realities and all.” He rolls his eyes. “Just wait until you start getting heroes petitioning your help for their cause. There’s only one you for all realities after all.”

Everything still feels so fresh, the battle and her actions that followed. The looks on the faces of her Paladins - her family by choice - as they said goodbye brought fresh pain to her heart. So perhaps that is why she asks, “Is that why you have guests, Bob? Do you miss your loved ones too?”

Allura doesn’t know why she expects anything different when he shrugs off the personal question with a smirk. “The circumstances are a bit different, but our goals of keeping order in the universe are the same.”

“So you are lonely,” she presses. She wishes to be anywhere else - with either her father and all her loved ones who waited for her, or with those she left behind.

Bob shrugs. “It comes with the job, but there’s no rule against visitors as you can see from yours truly,” he says with a proper bow. ”Is that why you gave him a part of yourself? Do you want them to find you?”

Allura looks at her hands, pink energy glowing around them in anticipation of her will. Lance doesn’t seem to mind the marks, a constant reminder of her sacrifice even more than the statue they built. Does it make him lonely every time he saw his reflection? “I wanted to give him something, anything, after he gave me so much. Can I - is there a way for me to go home?”

“Not without tearing the fabric of space and time,” Bob says, and Allura’s hope sinks. “But hey, what else is new for the Paladins of Voltron?”

Allura doesn’t want that, nor does she want more painful goodbyes.

Only bounded by her imagination, Bob says. Perhaps she can tell them she is alright, that she is going to watch over them; ask if they are truly happy…

She finds them asleep at night in her mind’s eye, in the reality she had left. The small act of Lance, Hunk, and Pidge wearing their Altean pajamas warms her heart. Surely of all realities, here she should be able to do _something_. She reaches out to the life force she left, eager to leave a message with Lance.

Instead her will finds a stronger and older link. Platt dreams of sampling Hunk’s cooking, Chuchule of sunbathing, and Chulatt of exploring Kosmo’s thick fur.

Allura clasps her hands together, hopeful. “Friends, please, can you hear me?”

Plachu’s whiskers tremble and he wakes, head turning as if searching for her voice.

The others rouse slowly while they chatter, wondering if they all dreamt of their tall friend.

Success! But now...what can she say? Can she just...bring them here?

Black lightning strikes in the distance and demands her attention. Allura severs her connection with the mice in time to see Bob jump in response to the flash.

“What… why is _that_ here?” he shrieks in an understanding that chills Allura’s spine, because she too recognizes it.

The rift entity, the thing that started Zarkon and Honerva towards their path of destruction. The thing she used to bolster her own powers…

And never removed from herself.

“It came with me,” she says in growing dread. Here where she had access to every reality...

The frequency of the flashes increases, getting closer by the tick. The edges of the white void darken as it approaches.

She turns to an awestruck Bob. “How do I stop it? I cannot let it get to the other realities!”

“I’m neutrality personified,” Bob explains as they back away from the black void. “It’s a creature born of the rift between realities; you need the same energy to oppose it.”

Power trembles at her fingertips, begging to be released. Allura grits her teeth. If this is her role now, to protect all realities and keep her family from having to fight any further, then she will do it.

Bob yelps and hovers behind her as the black lightning surges towards them, the last remaining bastion of light. Allura meets it head on, dropping Bob’s gift as the darkness halts at her outstretched arms. It twists around her body, searching for an entry point.

 _You used us once, let us in again,_ it taunts.

“Never again,” she spits, and her quintessence overwhelms it.

Not even a yalmore is capable of such otherworldly screeches. The entity from the rift between realities shrinks to its smallest form, resting in the palm of her hand and emanating a soft pink glow.

Because Allura wills it to be contained.

But Honerva proved that containing it is not a permanent solution.

Allura parts the white void as if it were a curtain. It opens to the quintessence field, the place from which it originated, where she allows the entity to drift under her magical supervision. She closes the rift with a wave of her hand.

It will never corrupt again.

Bob breathes a deep sigh of relief and slumps in his chair. “That was a close one. The realities without Voltron are a lot less traumatic.”

Allura tries to imagine what life would be like if the comet had never landed on Daibazzal. She only has to look in on the right reality and the peace she could have had pains her. But… then she never meets _her_ Paladins. In its future, Keith is never born, and Shiro passes away far earlier than is right.

She closes her mind to that reality. She doesn’t want a world where neither of them is there.

To think that small thing was responsible for the corruption of Honerva and entrapped the other Alteans.

She gasps in horror. “I never removed it from the others.” She frantically searches for the malignant entities and visions of the affected Alteans appear in the void above her. Allura tenses. There are five of them still out there. “I need to get them back into the quintessence field as soon as possible!”

“You won’t be able to trap them if they’re outside your realm,” Bob says. “I couldn’t do a thing to you Paladins until you entered my nebula. You may be able to see realities, but you can’t change them - that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”

“Then Voltron’s work is not yet complete,” she says sadly. Her friends can’t rest, not when Voltron is the only other force that can oppose these creatures.

“That thing getting into any of our realms is a bad idea,” Bob tells her, “but I don’t have to tell you what could happen if it does.”

“The corruption of all realities,” she agrees. Guilt fills her gut. She sacrificed herself to restore all realities, yet she delivered a malignant entity right where it could do the most harm. But… “If I could contain this one, I should be able to contain the other five before they find a way here on their own. It isn’t safe to leave them unaccounted for in the universe. The Paladins will need to form Voltron to bring them to me.”

Bob grins knowingly, snapping his fingers. “See, you knew the whole time.” He laces both sets of hands together and crosses a leg over his knee. “So, how are you going to bring the Paladins here?”

“Not while you are visiting,” she says sternly. “I will not have you taking them in for your quiznaking game show again.”

Bob sighs dramatically. “Too bad. I was looking forward to seeing a rematch of Shiro versus the Snick.”

She needs to contact Lance and the mice, but first, she needs to get the Paladin’s attention. They also need a way to find her. Lance is good with directions, but his methods would fail in deep space.

Her mouth tugs up slightly, but she’s unable to smile fully with longing overtaking her. There is no greater bond in the universe than between Lion and Paladin, the same bond that allowed Zarkon to chase them across galaxies.

And she was bonded to _all_ of the Lions.

Twin pedestals rise on either side of her. She places a palm on each one, her power flowing through this realm and into the greater universe.

She reaches the Blue Lion first, and her message is instantly understood. The Lions roar in acknowledgement. After the Paladins witness the send off, Allura bids the Lions to join her.

Now she waits for the Paladins to follow, looking forward to a very happy reunion.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Tumblr](https://rueitae.tumblr.com/).


End file.
